| dc.description.abstract | Sustainability challenges are deeply interlinked and pressured by the climate change context. Given these interrelated and complex challenges, there is an increasing agreement that new approaches to knowledge production and decision-making are required. Likewise, more science-policy interactions are needed to bridge the gap between science and policy and improve the use of knowledge for decision-making. Thus, integrative research approaches become essential to responding to sustainability issues.
Transdisciplinary approaches, as integrative approaches, are crucial to facing sustainability challenges since they address the science-policy interactions involving several sectors and actors in complex interactions. One example of this approach is the Nexus approach, which emerged to respond to sustainable challenges among different sectors. Due to the complex nature of the transdisciplinary approaches, societal impacts in transdisciplinary research are not straightforward and they need to be assessed to learn from their performance for future project design and promote impact delivery. Thus, the concept of productive interactions emerged as a potentially useful approach to assessing and studying societal impacts. Despite a consensus on the importance of interactions between researchers and stakeholders and the interest in its contribution to societal impacts, interaction analysis in the study and assessment of research impact are scarce, and undervalued.
In this context, this research aimed to increase the understanding of how productive interactions contribute to achieving societal impacts in transdisciplinary research by analysing productive interactions throughout outputs and outcomes in Nexus projects. For this, a framework based on the productive interactions approach, complemented by the theory of change concepts and contextual conditions, was used to analyse two European Nexus projects (SIM4NEXUS and NextGen). This resulted in an overview of the outputs, outcomes and potential societal impacts in each case, the type of interactions, the extent to which contextual conditions stimulated or hampered productive interactions, and how productive interactions contributed to achieving societal impact in Nexus projects. The research showed that Nexus projects achieve outputs and outcomes and increase the chance for societal impacts through productive interactions that emerge when stimulating contextual conditions (“broad stakeholder participation”, “problem definition”, “roles and contribution”, and “resource availability”) are met. Productive interactions lead to societal impact in Nexus Projects through a sequence of changes (outputs and outcomes) that entail exchanges and utilisation of knowledge produced by those exchanges. The results provided insights into the interaction process and recommendations to improve research design and enhance the societal impact of future transdisciplinary research. | |
